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Knowing Your Risk Tolerance. Before choosing funds, it’s important to know your risk tolerance—a measure of the level of fluctuation (a.k.a. volatility—ups and downs) or market risk to which you’re willing to subject your portfolio. If you are just getting started investing with mutual funds, or if you get highly anxious when your $10,000 account value falls by 10 percent (to $9,000) in a one-year period, your risk tolerance is relatively low—high-risk investments probably aren’t for you. You might consider starting with a balanced or ”hybrid” fund.

Opening an investment account is incredibly easy at most mutual fund companies. The easiest way to open an account is online. Information required will include things you already know, such as your name, address, date of birth, and social security number. You’ll also need to know which type of account is best for your investing needs. Here are the basic account types and how they work: Individual Brokerage Account: This is a regular brokerage account established for an individual (one person). Contributions are not tax-deductible, and investors pay taxes on capital gains and dividends. For more on this, see this article on taxation of mutual funds.

Perhaps the greatest benefits of buying mutual funds are that they are simple enough for beginning investors to buy and manage but they are also powerful and productive enough for even the most seasoned of investors. This guide will walk you through the purchase of your first fund to building a complete portfolio of mutual funds. Choosing the Place to Buy Mutual Funds. Although you can buy mutual funds through a discount broker, such as Charles Schwab or Scottrade, the best way to buy mutual funds is through a mutual fund company. But you don’t want to start with just any mutual fund company; you’ll want to do a bit of research to find a reputable firm that has a broad selection of low-cost, high-quality mutual funds.

Mutual Funds Are Diversified Investments. The nature of mutual funds as pooled investments that are professionally managed means that investors generally can easily accomplish one of the most important standards of smart investing — diversification. To diversify means to spread market risk by holding a variety of several different securities, rather than just a few. Most mutual funds invest in dozens or hundreds of stocks or bonds within one portfolio. Depending upon the type of fund, this accomplishes the fundamentals of diversification with as little as one or two mutual funds. However, when building a portfolio of mutual funds, especially as investment assets and objectives grow more complex over time, investors are smart to diversify across several funds in different categories.

Mutual funds give investors the ability to diversify across a wide variety of investments that they otherwise may not carry in their portfolio as individual securities. Since mutual funds invest in a diverse range of securities and investment options, one mutual fund share actually represents proportionate ownership in each and every investment in the mutual fund’s portfolio. Of most interest to investors is that each share also proportionately represents the profits of those investments as mutual funds are required to pass along profits to their investors by way of mutual fund distributions, which come in several forms.